There are a number of ways to protect data within an enterprise system, examples of which may include business continuation solutions and data recovery solutions. In order to meet with the demands of such systems, replica copies of data may be generated and e.g., stored at remote locations. In addition to maintaining such copies in a real-time fashion, older versions of data may be maintained for archival purposes.
Unfortunately, enterprise systems are continuously in a state of flux: old physical devices may be taken offline, new physical devices may be placed online, old software applications may be taken offline, and new software applications may be placed online. Unfortunately, such changes may result in data being orphaned, in that e.g., a data set is present on a system that was accessed by an application that has been removed from the system. Further, complicating the situation is that, being the application has been taken offline, the existence/utility of the data set is no longer readily apparent. Accordingly, the existence of such data sets may be essentially unknown.